Poetry Quotes: Poetry and Work

How do work and poetry fit together in your life? Is it a fruitful collaboration or discouraging? Here some poets express their thoughts on the subject...

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It may well be the unprofessional aspects of poetry--good poets come from all sorts of backgrounds and do every kind of job--that keep the art strong. --Boyd Tonkin

Watch out for our coming campaign, called Get the Poets Back into Banks, Doctors' Surgeries and Insurance Offices, where modern poetry began. --James Campbel

There is a certain kind of poet who is a clerk during the day. It seems to be necessary to have mundaneness, which must involve paperwork, the long slow soporific afternoons at an office, the sedateness of security, a regular paycheck... --Rachel Cohen

How do you employ a poet, since any reasonably good poet is going to be a Cassandra given to psychic keening: that never went down well in the staff room.--Peter Nicholson

By day poets masquerade as mere mortals: insurance clerks, teachers, librarians. But by night they prowl like panthers, seizing words on the run and crunching raw emotion. --Unattributed

I think that the diversity of my life has been good for me; I've written in many genres; I've done a lot of translation; I've taught school for thirty-six years; I've served as a town committeeman, a general editor, an academy president, and a lay reader; I've been a Broadway lyricist; I've played a great deal of tennis and bocce; I've tramped, botanized, bicycled, and spaded my own gardens. --Richard Wilbur

Every morning I would get up at four thirty, maybe five, and write until seven. Then I'd have to get my tie on and show up at the office. I worked eight hours a day, and then I was done. I wasn't correcting papers at night. --Ted Kooser

We are never free of the obligation to respond to the world... The poet doesn't keep office hours. --Lucien Stryk

I have no work habits whatsoever. If I did, I would probably write less because I would resent having to stick to a schedule or be at my desk at a certain time. --Billy Collins

Everyone's waiting for that period in life when they have lots of free time, lots of energy, and no distractions. That's called death. You've got to find a way of working in a crowded life with other priorities and constant distraction. --Dana Gioia

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These quotes are excerpted from Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis O'Driscoll, Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

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